


a little death around the eyes

by stelladown



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, Flashbacks, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-12-09 13:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelladown/pseuds/stelladown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will has a problem.  Hannibal has an unorthodox solution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a little death around the eyes

In Catholic school, Will had a classroom that looked something like Hannibal's office. It was an old church study converted for desks and students without much planning. A kid fell off the mezzanine and fractured his second cervical vertebra when Will was in sixth grade; they finished up that year in the sanctuary. It's an old memory, something he hasn't thought about in years, but now that he's thinking about it, he can (of course) see it replaying in high resolution down to the mangled little sound the kid's skull made when it bounced off the hardwood floor, because that's what Will does. It goes a long way toward explaining how apprehensive this room makes him, even outside of its sole inhabitant.

Hannibal's voice is crisp against the silence. "What's on your mind, Will?"

"What's on my mind," he echoes. "Isn't it your job to tell me what's on my mind?" He runs his fingers along a row of books, their spines remarkably free of dust. 

"Telepathy is beyond the scope of my practice, I'm afraid."

Will doesn't have to look down from the railing to imagine the slight crease of Hannibal's smile. He's good at seeing faces without looking at them. Impulsively, he slides out one of the books at random: Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen by Viktor Frankl. 

"Do you actually find these useful," he asks, flipping through a blur of endless German words, "or are they just for show?"

"Have you come to ask about my books?" 

"No," Will says slowly, rolling the syllable around a little. He has a hard time getting past the unsettling sensation of every action he makes, every word he says, being scrutinized by the doctor's cold intellect, even if he closes his eyes (Will’s first response to anything that makes him uncomfortable). The last psychiatrist he saw played Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' on a gentle loop to keep the atmosphere calm, but there's no hint of sound coming from anywhere inside this room, nothing except the ebb and flow of the white noise in his head. Nothing to distract him from picturing what would happen to his own body if he threw himself off the mezzanine. Will returns the book and climbs gingerly down the ladder to the ground floor.

"So," Hannibal offers, "you have come to pay a social call, then?" 

There's a teasing undertone, not so subtle that Will can't pick up on it. 

"Actually, I need you to help me sleep," Will says quietly. 

Hannibal stands up, smooths his jacket down in a delicate motion, and begins to pace slowly around the desk, shoes clicking in a quiet rhythm like the hands of a clock. Will likes the symmetry of his footsteps; he closes his eyes to listen. When he opens them again, the doctor is a few feet closer to him. 

"If what you bear witness to during the day is any indication, your dreams must be quite violent," Hannibal observes.

"'Violent' is ...." ( _entrance wound extending laterally across the left umbilical quadrant excoriated gunshot residue pattern of contusions ruby red lips doe eyes a black deer_ ) "You have no idea."

"You share your dreams with killers. Revel in their fantasies." Hannibal's voice is dry as leaves. 

"I don't _revel_ in anything," Will shoots back, grimacing at the volume of his own voice. "If I were reveling, I wouldn't be asking for help."

"What would you have me do, Will?" 

He focuses on a lithograph of a pine forest in winter hanging somewhere above Hannibal's right shoulder. "Don't psychiatrists usually ... prescribe medication for insomnia?"

"For most patients, that would be enough. Your problem, I think, is not so easily solved."

In his peripheral vision, he watches Hannibal take a seat and recline in one of his black leather chairs, crossing his legs at the ankle. 

"Come, join me."

Without really thinking, Will finds himself walking across the room and settling mechanically into the chair opposite the doctor ( _leather, cured, dyed - deer's hide_ ). It takes him a moment to notice that the chairs are much closer together than they were last time. If he stretched his leg out, his shoe would brush against Hannibal's knee. He wonders how long they've been like this, or if maybe this is an arrangement that's been put together specifically for this moment. 

"Let's try an exercise," Hannibal suggests, the sibilance in his accent like snakes in grass. "Do you trust me?"

“Do I – what?” Will is becoming acutely conscious of the proximity between them, Hannibal’s presence encroaching tightly into his personal space – he’s too distracted, scrambled up to maintain a steady flow of thoughts. The problem with “pure empathy” is that a strong enough stimulus can shut Will’s higher-order brain down like a sheet over a birdcage. Hannibal is a stimulus like nothing he’s ever experienced before. Maybe Hannibal already knows that; maybe that’s why Will keeps coming back, because he wants someone to shut him down like this. 

“A simple question. Do you trust me?”

“I … yes,” he says haltingly, looking down at his shoes. 

Without warning, Hannibal reaches out and tilts his chin upward with the crook of a finger until he has Will’s attention. Startled, Will's gaze darts frantically between the doctor's pupils, black and glossy like birds in an oil slick, searching for a cue. After a deliberate moment, Hannibal withdraws his hand and leans back in his chair. Will is left frozen in place, too unsure to move. 

Everything else in the office has faded away like a magician’s sleight of hand – suddenly it’s Will and Hannibal and nothing else, not even the desperate little part of Will’s mind that should be forcing him to look away, get up and leave, anything to avoid this kind of vulnerability ( _because you never know what might happen, you never know what you might say or do and they’ll use it against you, use it to hurt you_ ). The shallow lines that travel from beneath Hannibal’s eyes across his cheeks are suddenly hypnotic; he’s never noticed them before.

“You are very sensitive to touch,” Hannibal points out matter-of-factly. 

Will exhales, makes a sound too strangled to be a laugh. “It’s one of my many, uh, charms.” Sweat is already starting to bead over his skin. Hannibal’s expression remains impassive and completely unreadable, his stone-carved face like a gargoyle’s mounted on some castle parapet (these are the strange associations that float into his mind sometimes). 

“Your intuitive mind grasps the emotions of a murder and leaves you to process the corporeal. I suppose that must be what wakes you at night from your dreams.”

“The corporeal,” he echoes blankly.

“Your body, Will.”

The lamplight is wavering with the rhythm of his pulse, a dim aura blurring around the edges of his vision. Will is losing track of what he’s doing, what this conversation is about, why he came here to see Hannibal in the first place. That’s probably what the doctor wants.

“Tell me, Will,” Hannibal asks, a foreign quality entering his voice all of a sudden. “What is the difference between a man and a woman?”

“Wh- _what_?”

Hannibal leans forward and grasps Will firmly by the shoulders. Will can feel his body immediately lock up in a state of overwhelm; his pulse goes tachycardic, his throat constricting in sensory panic. 

“A woman’s body is a vessel,” comes the delirious sound of Hannibal’s voice. “She is passive, a receiver - her introitus an entrance. Yet a man’s body is external. He reveals his power to others. Doesn’t he, Will?” 

( _laterally extending contusion across the pubic symphysis deep maroon stained vaginal mucosa puncture penetrating the omentum penetrating into the umbilical quadrant penetrating_ )

(In his dreams, Will rapes. He has never touched a woman outside of his head but every night he violates bodies beyond comprehension and wakes up crying, sweating and hard and every morning he puts his clothes on and gets paid to look at bodies in the field and talk to bodies in his lecture hall and every night it starts over from the beginning, the same routine. Will thought once that male bodies were safe and tried looking for comfort there but male bodies are just the weapons that deliver pain and no body is safe from his destruction not even his own.)

Will might be crying.

“It does you no good to be ashamed,” Hannibal murmurs. His hands travel down the length of Will’s petrified arms to seize him by the elbows, thumbs pressing solidly into the soft space of his antecubital fossa, pinching his pulse. Will’s entire body is throbbing, humming beneath Hannibal’s touch. It’s disgusting. He would protest, or stand up, but to do that would be to acknowledge the horrible arousal that the doctor is coaxing out of his secret, dark places (and so much of him would rather not resist).

“Please make this … go away,” he manages to say between tense hiccups of air.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that for you.” Hannibal’s voice is subtly teasing, like before. 

“I don’t want this. I don’t want to feel – feel like this.” Will is just babbling now. He’s losing sensation in his legs. “Write me a prescription. I’ll do anything - I’ll do – I just – “

“Look at me, Will.”

He does. 

“What do you _really_ want?”

In that instant, Will is butterflied, pinned wide open. He wants so badly to lie, to cover up all of the terrible, evil urges rushing to the surface of his mind, but his excuses are as obvious as stains under a blacklight in Hannibal's overwhelming presence. There’s nowhere to hide. 

“To show you,” he whispers.

An expression that might be interpreted as satisfied steals across Hannibal’s face – a terrifying sight. 

“Then you have my permission.” 

Will swallows hard. He lets his right hand travel slowly from the chair’s metal armrest into his lap, his fingers confused, fumbling with the clasp of his belt, gaze drifting downward in shame and then darting back up with fear. Will pulls the zipper down quietly enough not to make a sound (as if hearing it might shock him back to his senses), and then he hesitates, his hand frozen in place, hovering over his jeans. 

Hannibal’s grip tightens, elegant fingernails digging into the flesh of Will’s arm hard enough to leave bruises. 

“Modesty is unbecoming of a killer,” he murmurs in encouragement. 

Trembling, Will reaches inside his jeans, cupping himself tentatively. His senses are starting to overlap – scent of pine, tannins, vetiver – expensive cologne – asphyxiating, enveloping his mouth, thick on his tongue – and he thinks he can hear Hannibal’s own breath speed up in excitement, pleasure, as Will (his consciousness in tatters, fractured, a million miles away) strokes himself upward until his thumb and forefinger meet. The urge is so intense that he can’t hold back a whimper of something almost like pain, and he’s already right there, so close, and in wordless anticipation Hannibal releases him, stands up and waits - 

Frantic, Will pitches forward onto his knees and buries his face in the folds of Hannibal’s jacket as he comes, spilling into his hand, and Hannibal gently strokes the back of his head as if consoling a child, combing through Will’s dark tangles as his shoulders heave and he struggles to find his breath. 

After a long moment spent savoring the sounds of Will’s complete loss of control, Hannibal murmurs, “ _La petite mort_.” 

“Is that … French?” Will’s voice is ragged, muffled against his chest. 

“ _Shhhh_ ,” Hannibal admonishes him.

\--


End file.
